


Real Boy Timestamps

by Sapphy, SapphyWatchesYouSleep (Sapphy)



Series: Unbalanced 'verse [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Childhood, Dysfunctional Family, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Falling In Love, Gen, Harm to Children, Love at First Sight, Loving Marriage, Mental Health Issues, POV Child, Psychologists & Psychiatrists, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Recovery, References to Suicide, Self-Harm, Suicide Attempt, Therapy, Timestamp, dark!stiles
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-01
Updated: 2014-05-05
Packaged: 2017-11-27 20:02:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/665904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sapphy/pseuds/Sapphy, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sapphy/pseuds/SapphyWatchesYouSleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Timestamps of Stiles' past, focussing on why he's so messed up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The First Goodbye

**Author's Note:**

> Yes the name I've given Stiles is a real name. No, I couldn't believe it either.
> 
> Trigger warnings for mental health issues, bad parenting, child carers and mentions of suicide (and that's just the first chapter)

Stiles had known it was going to be a bad day from the moment he woke up. Well, maybe not literally the moment, but pretty damn soon after. He couldn’t work out at first why he’d woken, no shrill alarm breaking the quiet of the house, and when he rolled over to look at his clock, there was still half an hour before the time he usually got up.

Then his mom called again, and he realised it was her that had woken him, shouting his real name from the bottom of the stairs, and he groaned and wished he could go back to sleep and restart the day, because he knew without having to see her that today was a bad day.

His mom’s bad days came in a variety of flavours, but his least favourite were the ones when she was manic, determined to be perfect, the perfect mom, the perfect wife. She tried too hard, and shattered like glass when it didn’t work, when her attempts to get everything just right didn’t work. He couldn’t comfort her on days like this. When she thought there were people trying to hurt them, he could help, could lock all the doors, could make sure she knew he was okay, put on trashy TV and make some microwave popcorn and sit with her until the episode passed. And on the days when she saw the truth, when she was afraid of him, hated him, he could go away, hide himself where she wouldn’t see him, and wait for her to calm down, and feel like he was doing something, however small, to help. But on the manic days, there was nothing he could do. Every attempt at comfort and reassurance was like a blow to her. All he could do was smile and lie and pretend as hard as he could that things were okay.

The hospital had said that things were better, that the new pills were making a big difference. Stiles thought they’d just given up. She’d been away three weeks this time, and when she’d come back she’d been nearly as bad as when she left, seeing enemies in every shadow, despairing over every tiny set-back.

Stiles didn’t know what to do. He’d had ways of coping, little routines and tricks that made things easier, but when mom had been in hospital, and Stiles had broken Sam Ward’s nose for calling her a crazy psycho, his dad had said that Stiles had to be normal. That his mom needed him to be normal.

Stiles had thought about it a lot. He wasn’t sure what his dad had meant by it, because he was distantly aware that normal children didn’t live in houses where all the knives were locked up. Normal children didn’t have alarms set on their watches to tell them when their parents needed to take their medicines. He thought that probably normal children, when faced with their mom building barricades of furniture against the doors would panic, would scream and cry and not know what to do. Stiles could do that, if that was really what his dad wanted, he was good at pretending, but he didn’t see how that would help. Surely giving mom the pills that made her sleepy, and putting the furniture back where it belonged was better than crying and not knowing what to do?

There weren’t any clean clothes. He was supposed to have washed them, because mom was ill and dad was working, but playing Sonic had seemed so much more important. He regrets it now, knowing he’s just giving the bullies one more thing to pick on him for. He doesn’t care what they think, but he cares that they hit him and he can’t hit them back. Once he starts hitting, he can’t seem to stop, and then his dad gets that awful disappointed look in his eyes, and takes away his Playstation.

When he got downstairs, a plate of breakfast was waiting for him, with a glass of orange juice. It looked like something out of a book, too perfect to be real. His mom had made pancakes in the shape of the letter P, like she used to do when he was little and still used his birth name. He smiled, and didn’t correct her when she called him Przbyslaw. 

She’d made him lunch too, in a brown paper bag with a smiley face drawn on it, like the moms on TV did. He smiled, and said thank-you, and didn’t mention that he got school meals.

“I’ll drive you honey,” she said with a smile, when he began to head out.

Mostly he liked days when he got a lift. The bus was hot and smelled funny, and he didn’t have any friends to sit with. He’d somehow never got the hang of making friends. He studied the other children carefully, copied what they did, and he knew he did it perfectly, but somehow still they avoided him. They said he was creepy and weird and would do anything to avoid sitting beside him.

Today though, he would happily have taken the awkward smelly noise of the bus over the close confines of the car, his mom’s too bright chatter. She was telling him how to make her families’ Pierogi recipe. Stiles half listened, enough to be able to nod at the right points. He didn’t mind cooking, liked that it was something him and mom did together, liked that it made his dad happy, but the knives made something dark and scary in his head prickle, hot and insistent, and he was never going to as good as her. Didn’t need to be, because she’d be there to cook them for him.

She ruffled his hair when they got to the school, and reached into the back for him to get his bag.

“Bye mom,” Stiles said, reaching for the door handle. “Thank you for lunch.”

“Wait,” she said, hand on his arm. “Honey, there’s something I need to say to you. I just… I want you to know that I’m sorry.”

“Mom? Mom, I don’t understand. What’s going on?”

“I’m sorry Stiles. That you’re a monster.”

And then she smiled at him, like she’d just said something completely normal and inconsequential, and kissed his cheek and said, “Have a nice day honey.”

Stiles stood on the pavement outside the school, watching the car drive away. It was the last time he ever saw his mother alive.


	2. My Little Monster

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As usual, warnings for the Stilinski's less than stellar parenting

The realisation, of what he was, of what that meant, came too him when he was eight.

His mom had been doing really well, home for more than a year now. The doctors have given her purple pills and she says they really help. Stiles doesn’t understand why, if the purple pills are the ones that help, the doctors ever bothered giving her the green ones that made her feel sick all the time, but his dad says it doesn’t work like that.

They’re cuddled together on the couch, watching some film called ‘Goodnight Mr Tom’, that his mom insists is a classic. It’s alright, but not much is happening, and the people in it talk weird.

Mostly he’s just enjoying being close to his mom. She says she doesn’t like the purple pills, because they make her fat, but Stiles thinks she’s nice like this, warm and soft and healthy looking, not like she was before, all her bones showing, sharp and uncomfortable when he hugged her.

His shirt was wet, he realised, his mom’s tears soaking into his neck.

“You okay mom?”

“Yeah, honey, yeah, I’m fine. It’s just a sad film.”

On screen, a boy about Stiles’ age is crying, holding the baby.

“Why?”

“Because the baby’s dead, honey. Haven’t you been watching?”

He has, and he knew about the baby. But it’s not his sister, he’s not the one holding the body of someone he cares about.

The way his mom’s crying, it’s like to her, it is happening to her. Like it’s her sister who’s dead. It’s not the first time he’s noticed it, but this is the first time he’s thought about it. Dad always says it’s not a good film if mom doesn’t cry, and sometimes dad cries too, especially at the lion king.

He remembers when he was little, Auntie May from next door coming to help look after mom, and crying because she was hurting so much.

That’s normal. Feeling other people’s pain. Worrying about virtual strangers.

Last week he took Nathan Moore’s juice box. He was thirsty. Mrs Summers said that it was wrong. He’d said why. And she said, because it’s Nathans. Because taking it upsets Nathan. She’d said it like that was supposed to mean something. Like Nathan being upset was important.

For a week he tried to puzzle out why Nathan was so important. Why Nathan matters. But he can’t work it out.

But maybe this is the answer. Maybe it isn’t that Nathan’s important, maybe not hurting people is important because it hurts the people around him. Maybe other people’s pain is supposed to hurt him.

“Mom, am I supposed to be crying?”

“Not suppose, honey. But most people would. It’s a sad film.”

“And when other people are sad. That’s supposed to make me sad?”

“Yeah honey, something like that.” She pulls him close and presses a gentle kiss to his forehead. “But you’re kinda broken, aren’t you? That’s okay. I love you anyway, little monster.”

His mom’s arms are warm and soft around him, and she smells of home, and of safety. But the word monster won’t stop echoing around his head.


	3. Flowers for the living

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just a short bit of almost fluff about how Stiles' parents first met. (Yeah I know, fluff in this 'verse! I wasn't expecting it either)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For me a big part of why Stiles ended up the way he is in this verse is that his parents were too wrapped up in one another to notice what was happening to him. They love him, but they love each other more.

It’s been a long day, the sort of grindingly dull day that makes John wonder why he ever became a police officer. He’s watching the clock, counting down the minutes until he’s finally finished for the day.

The station door bangs and McCauley strides in, escorting a young woman. She’s got melting brown eyes like a spaniel, and a soft smile on her lips and a seductive swing to her hips, and she’s the most beautiful thing John has ever seen.

She smiles at him like he’s an old friend, like he’s the one person she’s been wanting to see rather than the guy whose job it is to write out her rap sheet, and John’s struck by the sudden bone deep blinding certainty that she’s his girl. That she was always meant for him.

“Vandalism,” McCauley says, and it takes John a minute to figure out what she’s saying, because everything merely functional has fallen away, ceased to matter.

He coughs to cover his confusion, and scrabbles around the desk until he comes up with one of the forms that have to be filled in when anyone is brought in for questioning.

She answers his shy questions brightly, going off on tangents and giving him far more information than he needs, but not as much as he wants. He wants to know everything about her. If McCauley weren’t smiling mockingly at him, he’d probably be trying to pass off ‘do you like italian’ as one of the questions she needs to answer.

By the time he’s filled out the form he’s learnt not just that her name is Teklunia Gryzbowski, and that she’s two years younger than him, but that her parents are both dead, that she has a dog, that she loves icecream and that her favourite season is summer.

She cheerfully admits to stealing flowers from the cemetery flowerbeds. “Well the dead don’t need them,” she points out calmly. “And my landlady’s garden got hit very badly by the frosts this year. I thought this would be a nice surprise for her.”

She smiles charmingly, and John admits that yes, her landlady would probably have been very pleased, so long as she never found out where the flowers came from.

Teklunia grins. “I like to make people happy,” she says seriously. She has just a hint of an accent, just enough to suggest that maybe English isn’t her first language, and it gives her words a gentle lyrical quality.

John stays where he is as McCauly leads her off into the station, and stays where he is even after his shift ends. Vandalism charges never take long, a telling off and a fine, and he wants to see Teklunia again.

She smiles at him when they let her go, and hands him her coat. “You can drive me home,” she tells him firmly. “And tell me all about yourself.”

The next day he takes her to dinner. A year later they’re married. Two years after that their only son is born. John’s so hypnotised by her joyful smile that he cheerfully agrees to name the kid Przbyslaw (though he’s secretly relieved when the kid insists on being called Stiles.) For four years their life is sunshine and happiness and perfection. It doesn’t last, but John never stops thinking that Teklunia is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, and he never stops telling her so.


	4. Team Rocket Pokemon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stiles corrupts everything he touches.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this chapter is dark. Child suicide attempts dark, with added references to self harm and mama Stilinski, because apparently I'm allergic to happy. Really don't read this if that kinda things gonna trigger or upset you.

He meets Scott when he’s eleven and a half. Three days later he sits in the bath-tub with the razors from his school pencil sharpener and cuts his wrists.

It hurts, but not as much as he expects. He thinks that’s probably the adrenaline. They’ve been learning about that in biology.

He sits there, watching the blood trickle off the tips of his fingers and soak into the knees of his jeans, and thinks about Scott.

He’s always wanted a friend. Mostly he thinks people who aren’t his dad are stupid and irritating and not worth bothering with, but he’s always known that when he finally gets a friend of his very own, they won’t be like that. They’ll be fun, and clever and interesting and nothing at all like normal people. They’ll be like the shiny version of a human, like his prized Charizard. A human, but better.

And then Scott had moved to Beacon Hills and Stiles realised it had finally happened. The one thing he’d been waiting for all his life had finally happened. And Scott was everything Stiles could possibly hope for (except maybe for clever), and it was awful.

Stiles realised then that it didn’t matter how much better and shinier Scott was that everyone else. The one thing that couldn’t change was Stiles himself. He was still broken and twisted and wrong, he still corrupted and destroyed everything he touched.

It hadn’t mattered with his parents, not really. There was never a way of stopping them from knowing him, and by the time he realised what was happening, what he did to the people be cared about, it was already too late. They were corrupted. Mom was in and out of hospital, on a cocktail of drugs to try and keeps her functioning, and Dad was drinking himself unconscious every night. Stiles had done that, he knew he had, but his leaving wouldn’t undo it, because the damage was already done.

But Scott, Scott was still pure. Scott, who grinned all the time and laughed at Stiles’ attempts at jokes, even the ones other people said were too nasty, and had shared his lunch with Stiles on the day Stiles had forgotten his lunch money, he could still be saved. If Stiles were too go away, like his mom had gone away, then Scott would get to stay shiny, instead of becoming dark. Team Rocket Scott.

There was a lot of blood now, staining his jeans and gathering in pools at the bottom of the bath. Stiles hoped it wouldn’t stain. He’d only cleaned the bath yesterday. If it did stain, then his dad would have to clean it up.

Dad hated doing housework, and he was so busy with work. Maybe he’d get time off after they found Stiles, like he had when mom died. Then he’d have time to clean up.

But thinking about that made him think about when they’d found him mom. The way his dad had clung to him as they cried. The way, when he got drunk now (and that wasn’t nearly as often as it used to be), he’d call Stiles to him, and cuddle him, and tell him how much he loved him.

Stiles thought about his dad, crying and all alone while he tried to clean blood stains out of the bath. He thought about it as hard as he could, and then he got out of the bath, and found the bandages in the green box under the sink, and wrapped them as tightly as he could around his wrists. (You had to tie bandages tights, to help stop the bleeding. He knew that, from when his mom used to use the blades from dad’s razor to draw rows of neat lines on her thighs. Stiles used to sit on the closed lid of the loo and watch her, and then help her to bandage them up afterwards.)

There was bleach under the sink too. He got it, and did his best to clean the bath. It was hard, because you weren’t supposed to get bandages wet, and his wrists ached, but he did it anyway. Then he put his bloody jeans into the washbox, pushed right to the bottom where his dad wouldn’t see them, and went to bed.

It took his wrists a long time to heal up, and he had to ask Scott’s mom to help him change the bandages once, because he didn’t think he was doing a very good job of it himself. She’d looked very sad and serious while she did it, and later she’d called dad and they’d had a long talk while Scott and Stiles sat on the stairs and drank lemonade and talked about Batman.

And then his dad had taken him home, and cried, and hugged him so tightly it hurt, and told Stiles he wasn’t ever to leave him. And Stiles was glad that he hadn’t left his dad to clean the bathroom alone, even if it did mean Scott wouldn’t be a shiny anymore. He’d always liked Team Rocket cards best anyway.


	5. Forewarned is Forearmed

Ellen’s last appointment on a Thursday is with Stiles Stilinski, who she’s been seeing since he was eleven. He’s a nice kid, and she’s genuinely fond of him. He’s one of the most damaged of the children she works with, a mentally ill mother adding to what was probably a natural tendancy towards psychotic behaviour, but he tries harder than any other patient she’s ever had, of any age. She worries that he pushes himself too far, expects too much of himself, but he constantly amazes her with what he’s capable of.

“How was school today,” she asks, when Stiles has settled into the armchair he prefers.

He shrugs. “Okay,” he says, but his face has that disconcerting closed-off look that means it was somewhat less than okay.

“As good as all that?” she asks dryly, and Stiles smiles, just a little.

“One of the girls in my year had a fit,” he says. “She peed herself. Some of the others filmed it on their phones.”

“Was she okay afterwards?” Ellen asks, more to see whether Stiles knows the answer than out of concern for the girl.

“They took her to hospital,” he says. “She’s had fits before though, and she was okay afterwards, so I expect she’s okay.”

He’d thought about it, at least. That’s an improvement from when they first started their sessions. It’s reassuring to know she’s getting through to him.

“There’s more kinds of hurt than just physical,” she reminds him, because it’s something he struggles with, so used to his mother’s unwitting neglect and abuse that the idea that such things are bad, and not simply the norm, can be difficult for him to remember. “When she finds out that the other kids were filming her, how do you think that will make her feel?”

Stiles screws up his face in concentration, but doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere, so she gives him a hint. “If it was you, how would it make you feel?”

“Angry,” Stiles says at once. “Embarrassed.”

“Anything else?”

“Violated.”

“Very good,” she praises him, and she genuinely is impressed. Stiles struggles with identifying his own emotions, and his concepts of acceptable boundaries are fragmented and unreliable, so for him to identify a complex emotion like violation without even feeling it is a major achievement.

“So what does that tell us about the actions of the kids who were filming her?” she asks. Stiles has a fairly good working understanding of right and wrong, but sometimes he needs things breaking down, especially if the hurt caused is emotional rather than physical.

“That it was wrong,” Stiles says, without hesitation. “They did something that would hurt her, and they did it without a good reason, so it was bad.”

“Excellent. Well done Stiles. Now, what do you think you could have done to help?”

He thinks about that one. “Asked them to stop filming?” he suggests.

“Yes, and what else?”

He looks are her blankly, and she knows he will have considered and dismissed the idea that hurting the kids in some way might be the right answer (even though she privately thinks it wouldn’t be at all a bad thing if someone did teach them a lesson). After a minute, he shakes his head, unable to answer.

“You could have called a teacher,” she suggests, gently. They’re working on his self-reliance, and he is slowly beginning to grasp that other people might be allies, rather than the enemies his mother had always branded them, but it’s slow going, and teaching him that he can rely on anyone, especially adults, is a difficult process. “But I’m still very pleased with how much you thought about that. You’re getting very good at figuring out people’s feelings.”

He smiles a shy pleased smile which makes him look even younger than his fourteen years, and thanks her.

“Why don’t you tell me what else you’ve been up to since our last session?” she asks him.

“I learnt how to thrown someone heavier than me in Judo,” he says, excitedly. “It’s all about momentum.”

She’s torn on the subject of his judo lessons. On the one hand, it offers him a chance to work out some aggression in a safe environment, and the emphasis on control and discipline can only be good, but on the other hand, fond as she is of the kid, she doesn’t trust him not to use what he’s learnt of people who don’t deserve it.

“And Scott got the second highest marks out of everyone in our math quiz,” he tells her, and she’s touched to see how proud he is of his friend. This is a very different boy from the one she’d first met, his wrists still carefully bandaged and his eyes blank. The one who’d told her he didn’t think he would get an afterlife, because monsters didn’t have souls.

“Who got highest?” She makes a point of quizzing him on the small details of the world around him, to encourage him to pay attention to people other than those closest to him.

“Lydia Martin,” Stiles says at once. “It’s always Lydia Martin. She’s the cleverest person in the whole school. And she has the nicest hair.”

“Are you friends?” Ellen asks. It’s clear that Stiles’ feelings towards the girl are romantic, but she wants to see whether he recognises that.

“No. She’s cool and popular, and I’m the weirdo kid everyone thinks is a serial killer,” Stiles says, without rancour. “And anyway, I wouldn’t want to be friends with her. She’s too nice. I’d hurt her.”

“Why do you think you’d hurt her?” Ellen asks.

“Because she’s beautiful, and she bruises really easily, and she’d never date me in a million years,” Stiles says, matter-of-factly. “If we were friends, then I’d get jealous and probably do something bad. Much better to admire her from afar.”

He’s come so far, and learnt so much, from that scared little boy she’d first met. He’ll never be well, but he’s finding ways to cope, learning what constitutes acceptable behaviour. It’s a game to him, she knows, can see the hawk-eyed creature watching her from under the carefully constructed person suit he wears, but that’s okay. Her job is to teach him to cope, to find a way to fit in with society, and if building a mask is how he does that, she’s just impressed by the quality of his artisanship.

“Soon you’re not going to need me anymore,” she tells him. “You’re figuring this stuff out on your own. You don’t need a guide anymore.”

“Not just yet,” he says. “I’m not there yet.”

“No,” she agrees. “Not yet.”

They talk a little more, Stiles chatting about things that have happened at school, and books he’s read, while she questions him on what the appropriate responses might be, and gently guides him towards the right answers. He still doesn’t always quite believe her, not when it comes to treating strangers like people, or forgiving those who wrong him, but he’s learnt to accept what she says as guidelines, even if he thinks they’re ridiculous.

He pays her in cash, like he always does. Has done since he was twelve, and he turned up holding a crumpled handful of notes and begged her not to tell his dad, who couldn’t afford her fees anymore. The Sherriff thinks Stiles pays for the sessions with labour, mowing her lawn and watching her kids. She’d never let him near her daughter, but she goes along with the lie, knowing that it’s the only way to keep Stiles in therapy.

She doesn’t inquire too deeply into where the money comes from, she knows enough. She’d asked, once, when she realised a torn twenty he handed her had bloodstains on it, and he’d looked at her and asked, “How old do I look? Do I look old enough to give consent to you?”

She’d shaken his head, because he’d only been thirteen and he’d looked younger, and he’d smiled the kind of hard bitter smile that no child should know, and said, “That’s what I thought. That’s what the man that money used to belong to thought, but he didn’t care.” And that was that.

“For your homework,” she says, “I want you to think about why you like Lydia Martin, okay? Make me a list of the things about her you find attractive.”

He’s a late bloomer, his sexuality only now starting to emerge, and she can already picture the chaos it’s going to cause. The more information she has before that happens, the more likely she might be able to forestall a disaster.

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on tumblr, as gluttonforpunsihment (recs) or lentilswitheverything (side blog)


End file.
